By and large the performance of this library should be acceptable for most
needs. However, you should note that this library's primary emphasis is on
accuracy and numerical stability, and not speed.

In terms of the algorithms used, this library aims to use the same "best
of breed" algorithms as many other libraries: the principle difference
is that this library is implemented in C++ - taking advantage of all the
abstraction mechanisms that C++ offers - where as most traditional numeric
libraries are implemented in C or FORTRAN. Traditionally languages such as
C or FORTRAN are perceived as easier to optimise than more complex languages
like C++, so in a sense this library provides a good test of current compiler
technology, and the "abstraction penalty" - if any - of C++ compared
to other languages.

The two most important things you can do to ensure the best performance from
this library are:

Turn on your compilers optimisations: the difference between "release"
and "debug" builds can easily be a factor
of 20.